There's this competition called Volvo Ocean Race, in which heavily sponsored boat junkies take their latent talents to the high seas.*
To promote both its participation and its nautical domination, Puma left Il Mostro signage and giant footprints in the sand on the beaches around Rio, which is where the competition goes down this year.
Il Mostro's the name of its boat. (Guess it's somewhat more resonant than O Gato Gigante.) Two lucky civilians will be chosen to join Il Mostro's boat crew for one day. Visit the Puma Enigma site for more details.
The site doesn't presently work the way it's supposed to -- where you click on a flag and go directly to a brand destination. As things stand, no amount of clicking gets you much of anywhere -- except for the innocuous Puma.com logo at the bottom right-hand side, which sends you to the Puma Ocean Racing blog.
Beachside stunt by Espalhe Marketing de Guerrilha for Puma Sports Brazil.
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"Happiness Factory 3" continues Coke's Happiness Factory/Open Happiness campaign with a Monday-friendly beginning we can all identify with. Mid-yawn, a guy hits up a Coke vending machine, compelling all the Wonderland creatures inside to yawn too.
There's a bit of authoritative clapping, then some feel-good pop music kicks in. Everyone snaps open their Cokes, and both worlds bloom into quotidian activity.
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- Flashback to Madonna's banned Like a Prayer ad for Pepsi.
- Wolff Olins brings minimalist flickr magic -- and a forum for inquiry -- to "scientific" cosmetic brand Living Proof.
- Tracking (corporate accounts on) Twitter.
- The Guardian makes good observations about Twitter (scroll down to the bulletpoints).
- Ogilvy-branded solutions to a recession. Take that hype with a few spoonfuls of salt. Hat tip to our favourite mad man.
- JWT launches a blog called Anxiety Index.
- ScapeNation: another tween-targeting web destination, brought to you by Red Tettemer.
- Creatives on Craigslist. Yeah, it's sad. But not as sad as disseminating bulky PDFs about creatives on Craigslist.
- Legs, the content folk responsible for Diesel's "Pete the Meat Puppet," just launched its own website. Careful, desk cogs: it's ornamented with naked people, floating slowly about at extremely close range. (Like, close enough to see corns and butt freckles. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.)
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For years, we wrote about Britney Spears here on Adrants. It was almost obsessive. Then...she met Kevin Federline and, well, things changed. No longer was she the darling of global marketers but rather fodder for Perez Hilton, Jezebel and The Superficial. It hardly seemed appropriate to mention her antics here on Adrants so we didn't.
Apart from her ill-conceived appearance on the MTV Music Awards and her recent campiagn for her Hidden Fantasy fragrance, Spears has been all but absent from Adrants for three to four years.
While we're not going to label her return as the new face for Candie's Only at Kohl's triumphant, it's nice to see the girl back in the world of advertising. Yes, she never really left but you do have to admit she did take quite a hiatus.
The deal, which puts Spears in Kohl's 2009 print, TV, online and in-store efforts. ties Britney's sponsorship role to her concert tour which kicks off March 3. And there will be all kinds of Candie's pink along for the ride in the form of VIP pink carpets and lounges.
Tonight, Spears' "First Look" tour video will debut exclusively on the Candie's website.
Didn't You Hear pointed us in the direction of "Fast girls, Fast cars, One wild ride" -- two sponsors' attempt to penetrate the hype wormhole opened by the Ken Block Gymkhana practice video (which is also sponsored, just less obviously).
Sports Illustrated poster girls Melissa Haro, Jessica Hart and Damaris Lewis ease into respective Nissan 370Zs and demonstrate the car's uber-fun-and-fastness by grabbing onto things, throwing their arms up and shrieking like they're on Medusa.
The 370Z is cool and all, but this whole setup feels terrifically desperate. Then again, we usually react poorly to anyone who prefaces a pitch with "They're in for the ride of their lives!"
For you intellectual sadists, there are laughs to be had in the YouTube comment stream.
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Red Bull's partnered with Oakley to build a secret half-pipe behind Colorado's Silverton Mountain -- all so snowboarder Shaun White can have somewhere to train. (Okay, okay, it's not just for Shaun White.)
The space is closed off to the public and can only be accessed by snowmobile or hellie. Word has it the thing cost $500,000 to build.
Just goes to show -- brand love pays dividends as long as you stay away from other kinds of pipes.
It's called "Ken Block Gymkhana Practice." (But what is Gymkhana?, you ask.)
We didn't really get the big deal, but that was before we realized our fingers had burrowed into the glass tabletop. Then Ken Block did donuts around a guy on a Segway, and it was like, "Ohhh."
(It's racer porn. Plenty sexier than that one time you watched two Ford Fiestas tango in London. Even if you're not a speed junkie, the handling depicted in Gymkhana is fit to give you tingles.)
Mad Media put the video together in collaboration with Ken Block, DC Shoes and Subaru. Stats listed below.
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In this cockle-warming story about a hyperventilating geek who now wears onesies and gets his pick of trophies (both metal and collagen-enhanced), Tony Stewart reinforces the power of Swagger.* The Old Spice product previously de-geeked Brian Urlacher and LL Cool J.
Actually, LL Cool J's still pretty square. Sometimes getting all muscly to stop being square will only make you squarer.
But we digress. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the Swagger campaign. It's starting to feel a little less highlariously kitsch-tacular and more like Axe/Lynx. Which sucks because once upon a time, both brands were uniquely neat, and now they're almost exactly alike, except Old Spice is too red and Axe/Lynx is too potent.
Work by Wieden + Kennedy/Portland -- which succeeded, as always, in stimulating provocative discussion on YouTube.
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Joining the distinguished ranks of Dame Edna and Fergie, Hello Kitty is lending her likeness to MAC cosmetics.
"We are thrilled to partner with a brand that shares the vision of offering an innovative, authentic and transforming experience to our loyal fan base," said Janet Hsu, who said some similarly frothy thing when Sanrio announced its partnership with McDonald's earlier this month.
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